"That don't make no sense. That don't make no sense, atall." -Elijah of Buxton

In this post, I'm highlighting two things that have helped us make more sense of two aspects of our learning that can sometimes present challenges when we try to make sense of them. In our current historical fiction read aloud, Elijah of Buxton by Christopher Paul Curtis, Elijah the main character often observes things in the world around him and evaluates them in saying, "That don't make no sense. That don't make no sense atall." I'll be outlining how we are making sense of standardized tests and how we are making sense of the time period in US history before and during the Civil War.

Reading Strategies for Taking Tests

The first is our approach to taking standardized tests. This week, we will begin taking the SCReady test and next week the SCPASS test for Science. Each of these tests is set up to provide information to legislators as to how students have done this year in the fourth grade curriculum. You have lived and learned alongside us all year and know how very much we have learned about being readers, writers, mathematicians, natural scientists, mindfulness practitioners, and social scientists. However, sometimes the tests ask us questions in ways that are tricky to connect back to our experiences and reflections in these disciplines. So, we have been practicing a 3-step approach to each question.

First, we've considered "What have we studied, investigated or researched that connects to the question?"

Next, we try to note 3 significant things about the graphic in the question or what is being asked.

Finally, we sort through all the answer choices, to tell why the correct answer is correct and why the other answers are incorrect for the question.

We have learned so many things about the process of test making and test reading. One of the important aspects of test construction that we've learned is that there is somewhat of a formula to setting the answer choices that involves determining what common misconceptions could exist for the question and providing those as answers. This gives us an advantage in looking for the "why" behind a given answer choice.

Thank you for all you've done so far and all you'll do this week to keep your child in routine, getting enough rest, breakfast, and encouragement.

Westward Expansion, Slavery, & the Civil War

As we close our year in Social Studies we study the events that happened to expand the land of our the United States into territories that were the home of many Native American tribes and were the claimed property of different European Nations. The cooperation and conflicts that happened from the late 1700s through the next century are vitally important to who we know ourselves to be as Americans.

To understand the conflicts and cooperative engagements that took place, we have been watching pieces of the documentary The Men Who Built America: Frontiersmen. This situates the stories of exploration, protection, dispute, and settlement in the lives of some historical figures like Daniel Boone, Sacagawea, Lewis & Clark, and Tecumseh. We are taking notes, talking about the events we see, and synthesizing those events to answer questions using our collections of information as data we've analyzed. These also present opportunities for us to interrogate how the documentary is displaying the events, who is prominently featured, who isn't, and what more might we be interested in knowing to round out the story for our own knowledge.

We are also reading Elijah of Buxton, a book by Christopher Paul Curtis. He is a noted African-Canadian writer who highlights African-American/Canadian experience in his books in ways that are refreshingly honest to experience and incorporate the ever-humanizing aspect of humor in each story. In the following interview, he highlights his inspiration for writing the book and his process. He tackled the difficult topic of slavery with such a lens on the humanity of people who were enslaved. The story is set in Buxton, Ontario, Canada. This was a true-to-life town created by an abolitionist minister in the mid-1800s, for escaped and freed people who had been enslaved to start a new life. The story is told through the eyes of the first free-born baby of the community, Elijah Freeman.

I so appreciate the delicate balance that Curtis achieves in this book of sharing knowledge what it was like overcoming slavery with the knowledge of what freedom was like as well. In the book, he teaches us through lived events and characters' stories about the historical time period surrounding slavery, the influence of abolitionists in the time period, the conflicts and disputes over slavery that led to the Civil War. We also learn about the complexity of, personal strength, and community connections required to completely start over and make one's own way in the world.

In the interview, Curtis discusses how he works with writing in and honoring African-American English in ways that help us to feel the characters' cultural connections. Through characters' conversations we get a chance to understand some of the historical reasoning behind why truly respectful and humanizing language is so important and being mindful of our words matters to how we see ourselves and see other people as well.